The use of computing systems and computing network is a critical part of today's society. These systems, which comprise multiple computing related resources such as processors, storage facilities and countless interfaces that enable individuals to interact with these resources provide an essential tool for processing information and the transmission and receipt of information. A typical computing system has a distributed processing configuration. In this configuration, several processors positioned at various locations are connected to form the network. During operations, these processors perform the computing tasks of the system. Some tasks may require a combination of these processors to work in combination to accomplish the task.
As the reliance on computing systems continues to grow, in some instances, the amount of tasks placed on the computing system will require the system to operate at its maximum capacity. In addition, computer use patterns can cause a strain in computing resources at various times of day. Further, in some use patterns certain processors (servers) may have periods of heavy processor requests, while at that same time other processors may have only a minimal number of task requests. One response to this situation is to shift the processing of some requests to the processor server heavy traffic to the processor serving minimal traffic. This shift is known as ‘load balancing’.
Loading balancing of a multi-site network during peak times requires an autonomic process of obtaining a snapshot of a current machine, installing a new image to the target with the necessary applications to serve requests needed to alleviate the load, and recasting the image back to the target once the load has been alleviated or an overriding policy is reached. Security permissions for casting an image, rebooting machines and storing images must also be addressed.
Load balancers are known solutions along with autonomic provisioning of systems given certain pools of available machines. Autonomic provisioning of systems within the network under no load situations (such as nights and weekends) meets SLA criteria with minimal traces of intrusion (except for a reboot). However, current solutions rely upon pooling rather than dynamic sensing of systems—and have no awareness of security policies in effect within the enterprise (or shared resource data center) other than through inference in the pooling of systems. With a premium on the use of computing resources within an organization, in most instances certain computing resources are inactive for a large portion of a 24-hour day. Many persons have personal computers that they use while working. After hours, these computes usually sit idle. This computing capability goes unused. The load balancing processes normally do not include devices as machines that are available to perform computing tasks. During normal hours of use, this approach is understandable. However, during normal periods of inactivity, these resources have the capability of performing computing tasks as part of load balancing system.
As mentioned, concept of load balancing of computing resources is not novel. U.S. Pat. No. 6,658,473 describes a method and apparatus for distributing load in a multiple server computer environment. In one embodiment, a group manager process on each server periodically determines the server's capacity and load (i.e., utilization) with respect to multiple resources. The capacity and load information is broadcast to the other servers in the group, so that each server has a global view of every server's capacity and current load. When a given terminal authenticates to a server to start or resume one or more sessions, the group manager process of that server first determines whether one of the servers in the group already is hosting a session for that user. If that is the case, one embodiment of the present invention redirects the desktop unit to that server and the load-balancing strategy is not employed. Otherwise, for each resource and server, the proper load balancing strategies are performed to identify which server is best able to handle that particular session. In U.S. Patent application 2004/0267920, describes an exemplary media implementation, in which one or more processor-accessible media include processor-executable instructions enables a system to facilitate actions including: operating network load balancing infrastructure in a first configuration; scaling out the network load balancing infrastructure; and operating the scaled-out network load balancing infrastructure in a second configuration. In another exemplary media implementation, one or more processor-accessible media include processor-executable instructions that, when executed, enable a system to be configured such that different percentages of system resources may be allocated to different network-load-balancing functions. In yet another exemplary media implementation, one or more processor-accessible media include processor-executable instructions for network load balancing that, when executed, enable a system to gradually increase a percentage of total computing resources that is devoted to the network load balancing. Other implementations are described herein
Although there are load-balancing processes, there remains a need for a load balancing system that can incorporate machines that are temporarily inactive into the load balancing system. There further remains a need for a load balancing system that captures the configuration of this temporarily inactive machine and secures this configuration during the use of the machine in the load balancing activities and then restores this configuration at the completion of the activities such that none of the information of the primary is disturbed or compromised by the use of the machine in the load balancing activities.